Most events are installed on their deadline date, unless there is a long submission window or unless it's a rolling submission.
P=Poetry, N=Nonfiction, F=Fiction
Beach sun on a hot summer’s day. The pick-up kickball game at your local park. Some nerves that make your heart rate spike. Working out, working hard, the fear that something won’t work out. What makes you sweat?
How are Friends organizing today? We've noticed that many people get a sense of belonging from affinity groups they belong to, whether based on identity (race, gender, or sexual orientation) or politics or spirituality. How do these groups speak to us as individuals? Does it even matter if they fit with traditional structures?
Climate change has led to more erratic and extreme weather events in recent decades. For this year’s A Midsummer Tale, set your story during a heat wave or heat dome. Your story must be set during the hot summer months and the theme must play an integral role in the story.
We’re looking for stories, essays, memoir and poetry to do with afterlives: life after death, life after work, life after having a baby, life after divorce… Anything to do with what follows a major change in life, when someone or something ends and significant adjustment occurs.
This issue focuses on practices that place musicality at the centre of the creative process, exploring its generative potential as a source of material, rather than treating it as merely a complementary or incidental layer of performance.
As we all experience life from our own unique perspective, no two journeys are ever the same, while every poem and every story has the potential to open up new avenues for fruitful exploration – for writer and reader alike!
In the midst of war, family life goes on, taking new form as adoptions, fosters, and blood relatives all choose love over conflict. Tell us the stories of how this happens, who is involved, what the consequences will be, and why it came to be that this choice was the best possible outcome.
We’re looking for all kinds of poetry on the theme of Remembering. As always, we encourage you to bend the rules with both content and form.
Conversations, painful or joyful discussions, debates, gossip, pillow talks, or conversations you've always wished you could have had.
Make it funny, heartfelt, quirky and real.
The Golden Quill Writing Contest is a tri-genre contest that awards a total of $1,650 in prizes and publication in the 2025 issue of The NightWriter Review.
In Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist the spoon represents the importance of balancing creativity and career. We encourage poets to allow the oils of creativity to fall from their spoons in exchange for the pleasure of creating and having their poetry published.
How do we negotiate lesbian/queer desire across cultures and geographies? What does it mean to belong to a body?
We’re searching for LGBTQ+ characters who have a central position within the story. This will be a diverse and inclusive anthology.
The work must be written by a trans/genderqueer person, or at least one of the authors must be trans/genderqueer.
Inspired by Kelli’s own pup of the same name, this theme invites us to explore how the familiar shifts meaning—how something as simple as a tree can become a companion, a memory, a symbol. Focus your poetry on the relationships between dogs, trees, and the familiar.
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
THEMA Literary Journal examines how different writers respond to a single quirky theme.
We are dissatisfied with the future being offered to us. For this special issue, CrayfishMag invites poets and storytellers to imagine something better.
Don't be afraid to bring us broken, heavy stories. We can handle it.